Ballers Season 2- Suggs In Jugs Out

Ballers coming back for its second season as the Rock and the bald guy from Hot Tub Time Machine get together and sign some football talent for their financial agency. Yes financial management isn’t a sexy subject, however when the Rock’s involved it can’t be anything but sexy and so it therefore is in Ballers.

There are spoilers for season 2 of Ballers in this post.

I like Ballers well enough, it’s a feel good show where a bunch of people with too much money get up to shenanigans and throw their money around as if it has gone out of fashion. It is always interesting to see how the other side live their lives and being a mere pleb I couldn’t really fathom what that life would be like.

The cast is fairly solid, the Rock is Mr. Charisma as always, Joe’s a nice little sidekick and Charles is lovable. Ricky is still by far the best character in the show, his dad was a nice addition and Vernon still can’t act for shit. The cameos which Ballers has from genuine NFL players are absolutely outstanding. To get current big names like Suh, Suggs and Sean Payton is quite the feat and gives Ballers real legitimacy. I think it also helps when guys like Suggs really deliver and cameos like Eddie George being brilliant in the finale.

Sadly that is where the compliments for Ballers end and the criticisms start. As far as I am aware Ballers is supposed to be a comedy, yet I don’t find myself laughing very often. I have no issue with going for a comedy-drama type of show because it makes more sense than going full comedy for this subject matter, however they seemed to have forgot that its meant to be a comedy.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the drama side of things in Ballers was top notch, however it is still pretty poor. Ballers has this really bad tendency of creating a problem, making it seem untenable, only for it to be resolved with absolutely no consequences. Spencer gets sacked, only to be tapped up by Andre (who has been played up as his arch nemesis all season) with an incredible job offer, tries to make a really poor deal with other people’s money (exactly what caused him to go broke initially), only to be rewarded with his old job back but with a better deal than he had before… If there are never any consequences for people’s actions then you don’t get absorbed into the situation as you know it will all work out.

The weird thing about the finale was that Spencer goes to talk with Eddie George to try and get his license, gets told to go fuck himself, then does a speech about what a dick he was and why not to be reckless with your money and the season ends with him finally having his hip replaced. The problem is that you know next season Eddie George will forgive him and we’ll be right back to where we were before.

The other characters didn’t really have much of a season either; Ricky swithered over which team to sign for ($1.5m…classic Patriots…tight bastards) and we never actually got his answer, Charles became a back office guy and had some relationship drama, Vernon tore his Achilles and Joe…well Joe was there too.

This season saw the introduction of two characters who were both equally poorly written, Andre and Travis. They set the season up as Spencer vs Andre, however by the end of the last episode the entire feud had totally fizzled out and essentially came to nothing. Travis was a terribly written character; he goes from a bonehead redneck to an upstanding fellow. Some of the most Ballers writing came in regards to Travis, from the fast 40 on sand after he had been drinking alcohol, to the getting drafted number six because T-Sizzle said he was a solid dude, it was all generally terrible.

Female characters are still terribly written in Ballers, to the extent that it is completely embarrassing. It is a show about the NFL but you’d think that they’d be able to add one female who was there for more than getting coked sniffed off her tits.

The only tits that matter in Ballers

Ballers threatens to be really good, yet is never able to actually deliver. There are so many good aspects to the show, from the cast, to the music and the cameos, however there is such little story progression, the laughs have all but disappeared and there are no real consequences that the show ultimately falls flat on its face because of poor writing. I do think that the finale was the strongest episode of the season and it set up the next season pretty well, sadly I don’t think they will capitalise on it at all and by the end of the first episode it will be all back to the same predictable writing.

So what did you think of Ballers season 2? Are you wondering where Spencer gets all his lovely suits? Does Suh Casa have meatballs on the menu? Or are you just wondering If Suggs ever got to blow his nut? Well leave a comment and share those thoughts!

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